Is it really something to be proud of? Somehow as a result of IE hate we ended up with a Chrome-dominated world.
There was a sweet spot between roughly 2007 and sometime in the mid 2010s when web developers coded to standards instead of just the dominant browser, and where there was browser diversity: Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, and IE 7+. It was a good time for the Web.
Chrome then became dominant, and unfortunately now we're in a "Best viewed in Chrome" era, and we're back in an era where some developers only code for the dominant browser.
Chrome when it came out was much faster than Firefox. It was lighter and worked better.
Also macs had moved to Intel chips a few years before and were actually pretty decent so a lot of people were moving to them.
Also of this chipped away at XP and the few people running XP machines were diehard xp fans or corps that were dragging their heels upgrading.
It also had an outsized impact on the web because it was a popular with developers for doing web development.
In 2010 Firefox 3.5 had a estimated global market share of 15-20%. BTW nobody thought any of the stats were accurate at the time as they were easily skewed. Some counters would report 30%, but it was an estimate and not a reliable one.
On the sites I was building, which were mostly travel sites, e-commerce and later gambling. Firefox was maybe 5-10%. I am also no in the US. I just didn't see anything like what was reported in site stats for the things I was working on.
Later on it was IE and Chrome and Firefox was still at maybe 10%. I really cared about compatibility and web standards at the time and made every effort to make sure that the sites work. So I knew it wasn't a "the site doesn't work in this browser".
> It also had an outsized impact on the web because it was a popular with developers for doing web development.
So people that used the net heavily used Firefox and people that didn't tended to use IE. So on some sites Firefox usage would be far higher than it would otherwise be.
e.g. People using IE might only use the internet for online shopping, checking mails, so visiting an online shop, booking a flight etc. Whereas many Firefox users would be using Social media, Blogs, Forums or YouTube more heavily. So you will see two completely different pictures depending on what your site's audience would be.
That is why the statistics can be misleading.
There's a long time during which Firefox was somewhat slow, and I remember the spidermokey team releasinf the famous Are we fast yet website that was saying no during this period.
I was so happy when Chrome came out. Over the years I've tried going back to Firefox and I've gone back to either Chrome, Ungoogled Chromium or Brave.
On Linux though, and blocking ads.
At the time 3.0 came out I was still in University and every other student I spoke to had the same experience. People also experienced in my first place of work in 2009.
This problem was ultimately fixed with 4.0 when they did something different with how multi-tab worked.
I was in perf engineering at the time. we would switch between a handful of string concatenation methods every browser release. it wasn't much about real performance, but just shifting trade-offs in the jit. but google PR team was very good at running in front of the changes and pointing their overly optimized way to magazines. so they would run an array concat test that was much faster while being much slower in plus sign concat, but they often left that out. anyway, everyone drank the coolaid. 100% of the v8 performance over spider monkey was not attaching debuggers and dev tools. and sadly, mozilla had to follow. nowadays we are mostly back to square one (still some niceties from dalvik missing).
true performance improvement came much later than that.
No I am not. I remember this clearly and all my friends were complaining about it before chrome was released. I just checked the dates. Firefox 3 was released a whole year before Chrome.
I really don't appreciate it when people tell me that I have been swayed by some big company, when my friends and I were complaining about it before we even knew that Google had a browser.
Firefox used to just completely lock up. Wouldn't load a tab. Chrome didn't with the same number of tabs. I am not talking about JS perf speed or anything like that, I am talking about the browser just not locking up when using more than few tabs.
When browsing Firefox 3.0 would randomly not load a site when say about 10 tabs were in the window and hang for about 30 seconds. It was annoying. There was an obvious issue with how it handled the tab isolation (it didn't really that was the issue). IE 8 and Opera didn't do this.
It has nothing to do with my impression of Google Chrome because Google Chrome didn't exist at the time.
I do occasionally think Safari is the new IE though -- not in terms of terribleness but just in terms of holding back the web by being the slowest to implement big new features.
You mean Chrome-only non-standards that Mozilla usually opposes, too
I'm sure there are many such examples.
Firefox implemented them in 2014, Edge in 2020, and Safari re-introduced them in 2022.
The was a proposal to remove the spec entirely in 2015: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/315
I don't think I've seen a feature that was shipped in s browser for years, then removed, and then shipped again.
I'd love to know why. They only explanations I've seen seem to be this: https://x.com/xeenon/status/652573047623323648 "The implementation of Shared Web Workers was imposing undesirable constraints on the engine. It never gained any adoption." and this: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149850#c5 "This feature was originally removed temporarily during multiprocess bring-up, and actual usage on the web has been pretty low. We're willing to reconsider if there is significant demand."
Since 2014, three years after desktop, I'll grant you that (though it's not forever)
> WebGPU still is only partially supported on desktop.
And it's only partially supported in Firefox. Perhaps something to do with actually fleshing out the APIs and not rushing with implementations like Chrome?
Edit: Firefox enabled WebGPU only on Windows this year.
Safari enabled WebGPU on all devices this year with *OS 26.
> Memory64 isn't available yet at all.
You mean the one released in Chrome this past February, and in Firefox this past January? Less than a year old?
And used on a whopping 0.0001% pages? https://chromestatus.com/metrics/webfeature/timeline/popular...
And honestly I wouldn't care except they don't let you USE ANY OTHER ENGINE in mobile. If I could just skip Safari I would, but even Chrome on iOS is basically Safari.
Often for s good reason. Once something is in a browser, there's signs no change in hell to fix it or remove it.
Chrome doesn't care. They just ship whatever even if the other vendors are actively against it for many reasons.
The longer answer is yes, absolutely.
Firefox briefly dominated the web in between.
Chrome dominance is a result of Google wanting to control the web and its dominance in the ads and search areas.
Chrome was simply better than Firefox, Internet Explorer, Legacy Edge. I am not a Windows Admin, but Chrome also offered an MSI package whereas Firefox didn't bother until years later. So it was easy for IT to roll out Chrome as part of the standard corpo install image and not an option with Firefox.
As for web development it offered better JS debugging and had a decent phone emulator built in and this was back in 2014. I am sure I could also debug phones as well with some reverse proxy shenanigans via fiddler and some open source tooling I forgot the name of now.
But the trend for IE started before this and continued after it.
People try to equate it to Safari now but that's just not comparable. Safari will render something badly or not support a CSS decorator that you'd really like to use, but it will rarely crash, go into an infinite URL-fetching loop, or arbitrarily fail to recognize random HTML tags.